Web Content Additions Added Successfully: From Dec. 2010 through May 2011 I, JGW, the web site builder and administrator, added a great deal of web link content to the web site where the web links referred mostly to national news articles online showing Trends in Education, for better and for worse.  I also upgraded the web site from Joomla! version 1.5.14 to v1.5.18, then to v1.5.22, and finally in May 2011 to v1.5.23, the latest version of the Joomla! 1.5.x series.

 

Promising Joomla! Upgrade falls short: Although the Joomla! major release version 1.6.0 debuted in January 2011, with many very attractive new features, almost all of the extensions I have been using for my Joomla! v1.5.x sites were not updated then and most remained not updated to be useable on v1.6.x as of May 2011.  Therefore, constrained by the very slow (pro-bono) work of the programmers who make up the Joomla! open source extension development (and improvement) community, I have not been able to upgrade the WebLearningTools Research web site properly to take advantage of the superior web sites v1.6 can provide while keeping all the existing content and features of the site, from the latest v1.5.x server code to the new, improved Joomla! v1.6.x server code.  I expect I may not be able to do so until the end of 2011.

Promising Web Conferencing Opportunity falls short: From December 2010 through May 2011 I rented at low cost and offered as a free service to educators online web conferencing rooms, virtual conference rooms very suitable for educational presentations and discussions of complex topics.  The web conferencing was care of GVOConference.com, a private communications company with which I have been affiliated since August 2006.  The GVOConference web conferencing service I rented could occur in any of 10 500-seat (persons or locations) conference rooms assigned to my use.

Unfortunately, I did not have the time Jan-May 2011 to properly cultivate the educational and progressive political virtual conference room users who could most benefit from using any one these 10 virtual conference rooms.  Other complications arose:  In April or May 2011 Skype, a person to person or three-person online conferencing service, announced that it would be offering multi-user audio-video and text-chat web conferencing by Fall 2011. I assumed that new service will match and soon surpass the otherwise excellent features of the 10 500 seat GVOConference rooms I had been renting.  In May 2011 Microsoft corporation announced that it would be buying Skype. Microsoft also announced that the company would integrate the new, improved Skype web conferencing services with it's own networked personal computer and enterprise level software products and services.  Developing ways to use the GVOConferencing service to help poorer educators, to my mind, became a much less promising activity by which to help those educators who need as many free educationally helpful web services and as much free "open commons" educational content to offer their students as possible.

I do not expect GVOConferencing and the related, also privately held, but problematically managed and marketed web services to last much beyond mid 2012 with such new, better funded and more broadly and deeply technically competent commercial competition of Microsoft, Skype and other emerging competitors.  Therefore on May 31, 2011, I canceled my subscription to rent the 10 GVOConference rooms.  Those educators who can afford the new conferencing services can buy them and use them.

An Open Source Alternative to Provide Free Web Conferencing for Poorer Educators: In April 2011 I performed a bi-annual web search for free open source web conferencing software.  I found Big Blue Button (BBB), a free open source project started in 2010.  As of April 2011 BBB was available as version 1.xx, which I assumed to be more stable and reliable than the previous versions offered in 2010.

BBB has almost all the web conferencing features I have liked so much on GVOConference and on it's predecessor windows-only software, HotConference. As open source, any technically competent person can join the BBB "core code" development team to improve the free software service.  Furthermore by design BBB allows for any other web application developers not on the core code team to create extensions to the BBB conferencing services.  That means that BBB web application code and increasingly numerous extensions to BBB are much more likely to evolve continuously and more rapidly than will many of the competing commercial web conferencing products and services.

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